Bron Gondwana

In the past couple of years there's been renewed enthusiasm for improving the open source email client standards, with multiple new IMAP standards becoming RFCs, and a revision of the base IMAP standards currently in evaluation.

As the working group co-chair of both the JMAP (new email standard) and EXTRA (updating existing standards) working groups at IETF, I've been following email standards closely. I'll talk about what's happening in both working groups, how to find the specifications, and some cool new things you can do as an email client (or server) author.

For the past 4 years, FastMail has been working on a next generation email protocol for our web interface. We have years of experience writing email clients and servers, and we know where the pain points are. This protocol is in production right now, and a 30 second demo will show it in action.

At the moment the email world is divided. Every vendor is building their own proprietary JSON protocol, because IMAP+SMTP is a really poor fit for mobile apps and even the LEMONADE protocol changes haven't made the experience good enough.

We want to change that by offering a completely unencumbered standard which is good enough that companies don't need to build their own, and gain an interoperability layer which is better for everybody. Raise the baseline experience if you will. We believe it's possible to have a protocol which is both open AND good.